I Want a Phone That Used to Exist | Hacker News Reader

I Want a Phone That Used to Exist

5 pointsmouse_10 comments

I want a modern Android phone with no holes or gaps in the display, with a headphone jack and no camera bump. The phone should sit flat on a table, show me the full screen with no compromises for the sake of selfies, and support the audio output included in nearly every device from the 70's to the 2010's. The phone should run whatever software I like, which means board support packages are available. This almost exclusively limits the chipset options to Qualcomm.

Just a few years ago, this was not a lot to ask for. Many flagship phones fit this bill and were in fact very good options. Today, there appears to be no phone like this on the market. I could be wrong but it seems every phone released recently enough to be useful is full of subjective downsides compared to what was available in the past.

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Consider the PinePhone Pro:

- headphone jack

- no camera bump (well, it does have one, but it is no higher than 1mm, if that, so it lies pretty much flat)

- no gaps in the display (and a pretty impressive screen-to-body ratio considering that fact)

- runs whatever software you like - almost in excess! The SoC bootloader comes unlocked and most users choose to follow that with a Tow-Boot installation to load their ARM operating system of choice

It is not a 'modern Android phone'. You'll probably have difficulty getting Android on it at all, and the processor (at least for the non-pro model I own) was literally designed for use in point-and-shoot cameras, not smartphones, so expect... 'nostalgic' loading times.

It's not practical for all but the most enthusiastic hackers, even on Hacker News, but there is a delight in a multiple-year-old handset getting faster and more reliable as the FOSS community continually introduces refinements to all parts of the software stack.

All of this, plus that it's become extremely difficult to adequate secure a smartphone or to use it in a secure way, is why I'm ditching smartphones entirely.

The juice isn't worth the squeeze.

Have you tried KaiOs? I live without a proper smartphone for 10 years and Kai fits my needs in sharing internets.

Yes. The only "dumb phones" I can find are actually low-power smartphones running KaiOS -- so that's almost certainly what my phone will end up having to be. Still, I'd prefer an actual dumb phone.

It's impossible to secure a dumbphone too. The baseband processor is a black box that can execute code and is completely outside the control of the user or mobile os.

That's true, but that's not a problem in terms of the security profile I want to achieve.

> The phone should run whatever software I like

Even viruces?

Bank apps will not work in not enough walled garden.

> Bank apps will not work in not enough walled garden.

use the web apps?

Modern banks in my country use to have no web version exactly as no land offices.

Yes. If I tell my phone to install a virus, I would hope the virus installs. That's my own personal responsibility. Responsibility is integral to freedom.

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